From today’s press release:

Leaders of the Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc., announced today that former President Bill Clinton will receive the Foundation’s “Humanitarian Award” and serve as the keynote speaker at a January 8, 2009 Miami Dream Dinner to raise funds for Memorial to be built on the National Mall. The dinner will take place at Fontainebleau Hotel and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which donated $1 million to the Memorial Foundation, will serve as the lead dinner sponsor.

…

President Clinton played a key role in the Memorial’s inception and has remained an active supporter. On July 16, 1998, Clinton signed a Joint Congressional Resolution authorizing the building of a memorial and on November 13, 2006 he participated in the Ceremonial Groundbreaking. He has served on the Memorial Foundation’s President’s Council for several years.

An expected 22 million people a year will visit the tribute to King’s transformational impact on the country, and the world.

How would you commemorate King?

On Wednesday, J-Lab (the Institute for Interactive Journalism) announced the winner of this year’s Knight-Batten Innovation Award: Wired.com’s Wikiscanner coverage “which helped readers investigate and expose ego-editing and corporate whitewashing of Wikipedia entries.”

PolitiFact.com, with its “Truth-o-Meter” for 2008 presidential campaign statements, and Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information, a site to report incidents of political violence from mobile devices, email, and the Web, won Special Distinction Awards.

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Yesterday, Patricia Martin of the Culture Scout Blog posted about teens and the Knight Future of the First Amendment survey and research.

“It seems that when First Amendment rights are made relevant through self-expressive technologies, kids grasp it. It makes the case for why information privacy needs to become part of the First Amendment freedoms.”

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At the 2008 Online News Association Conference (follow the conference Twitter updates) that continues until Saturday, sessions and pre-conference workshops on media included a workshop on news games; Kurt Greenbaum of STL Social Media Guy blogged about how journalists are embracing news games. The Knight News Challenge winner Gotham Gazette is mentioned.

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And Heidi Williamson, who helps promote the Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative digital news delivery), has posted a new Seesmic video “What are the obstacles for innovation?” More than two dozen video responses have been posted, and you can join the discussion with your response here.

Flickr image from rockyradio

From the 6.28 press release:

Proving once again that it indeed deserves the title “world renowned,” the Akron Art Museum, designed by the Viennese firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, was chosen as one of three finalists for the highly prestigious Lubetkin Prize from the Royal Insitute of British Architects (RIBA) in London. After winning one of RIBA’s 2008 International Awards, following a visit by a jury of architects and lay judge, the Akron Art Museum was honored further by being chosen as one of only three worldwide finalists for the Lubetkin Prize.

…

“It is an incredible honor for all of us in Akron who worked on the museum’s John S. and James L. Knight Building to have it singled out by the world’s leading architectural organization as one of the three most important new buildings outside Europe,” said Mitchell Kahan, director and chief executive officer of the Akron Art Museum. “When I think of all the great structures unveiled last year around the globe, from Asia and Africa to North and South America, this recognition underlines the success of our goal to create an innovative design of worldwide significance.”

Find more images (and interesting manipulated photography) of the Akron Art Museum’s Knight Building on Flickr.

Have you visited the Akron Art Museum? What is your favorite museum building?

Are you using new technologies on public issues?

The application deadline for the Knight-Batten award (given by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism) is next Wednesday, June 11th.

There is a $10,000 grand prize, up to $5,000 in special distinction awards (including a wild card award), a $1,000 citizen media award.

The Knight-Batten awards are given for: online news experiences, news games, mobile news ideas, citizen media, creative use of cell phones, Webcams, vlogging, podcasting, social networks, computer kiosks, new applications of software, content management systems and other advances in interactive or participatory journalism.

Last year’s winners included techPresident.com, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR.org) crisis guides, the Reuters Second Life Virtual News bureau, and the Washington Post’s citizen narration series On Being.

From the J-Lab site:

Honored are pioneering approaches to journalism that:

* Encourage new forms of information sharing.
* Spur non-traditional interactions that have an impact on community.
* Enable new and better two-way conversations between audiences and news providers.
* Foster new ways of imparting useful information.
* Create new definitions of news.

Entries from all news producers are eligible. Encouraged are both top-down and bottom-up innovations, those driven by news creators and those driven by news consumers.

The online application is here. Winners will be announced in the summer of 2008.

E-mail news {at} j-lab {dot} org with questions.